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Evangelical

Christian Zionism I: Where Did It Come From?

November 14, 2013 by Gerald R. McDermott

Continued from Page 2

Bicheno was postmillennialist, as Edwards had been. His work inspired a raft of postmillennial English thinkers after the turn of the 19th century, well before the rise of premillennialism there in the 1820s and 1830s. Other English leaders such as Charles Simeon and William Wilberforce were also inspired by biblical prophecy to promote missions to Jews, but they were influenced more by Calvinist theology with its emphasis on God's election of a chosen people, and the philo-semitism of Lutheran pietists in German-speaking lands. All of these saw the significance of Jews to eschatology, but without concern for or belief in premillennialism.

In his Origins of Christian Zionism, Donald Lewis explains that it was a return to a closer and more literal reading of the Bible after the Reformation that gave all these Protestants a new interest in eschatology, and the role of the Jews within it. And in England especially, it was a shared Calvinism "that resonated with the idea of the divine 'election' of the Jews," not premillennialism or postmillennialism, that fired the imagination of the hordes of prophetically-minded English Protestants in the 19th century. Evangelicals in 19th-century England saw philo-semitism as their distinctive calling card, distinguishing them from Catholics who they claimed had persecuted Jews in the long history of Christianity, and from the Anglo-Catholicism of the Tractarian movement started by John Henry Newman. Both Catholics and Tractarians were asserting that they had the best historical claims to Christian faith; evangelicals used their philo-semitism to proclaim that their claims were even more ancient—going back to biblical Israel itself.

The most famous and powerful English philo-semite in the 19th century was Lord Ashley, the seventh earl of Shaftesbury (1801–85), ennobled in 1851. He "became the leading proponent of Christian Zionism in the nineteenth century and was the first politician of stature to prepare the way for Jews to establish a homeland in Palestine." His advocacy for a Jewish homeland was critical to the intellectual development behind the Balfour Declaration (1917).

What in particular inspired Shaftesbury? Lewis points to a number of influences:

1) Shaftesbury was a social reformer interested in the underdog, and he saw Jews as victims of historic Christian persecution. He shared a general British alarm at the persecution of Jews in the Damascus Blood Libel of 1840 and the mistreatment of Jews on the island of Rhodes as part of a general pattern in the declining Ottoman Empire.

2) He became an evangelical in the 1820s and most likely was influenced by postmillennialist Thomas Scott's Bible Commentary (1792), which popularized the idea of a Jewish return to the land.

3) He was ashamed that England was the first western nation to banish Jews, setting a terrible example to be repeated by France and Spain. Now England had the opportunity to be the first Gentile nation to cease to "tread down Jerusalem." This would lead not only to creating Jewish allies to the Empire all over the world, but it would also bring down the blessing of God on the Empire. Shaftesbury was convinced by Henry Hart Milman's History of the Jews (1829) that Jews are at the center of the story of the rise and fall of European nations:

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We may trace, in the pages of history, the vestiges of this never-slumbering Providence. No sooner had England given shelter to the Jews, under Cromwell and Charles, than she started forward in a commercial career of unrivalled and uninterrupted prosperity; Holland, embracing the principles of the Reformation, threw off the yoke of Philip, opened her cities to the Hebrew people, and obtained an importance far beyond her natural advantages; while Spain, in her furious and bloody expulsion of the race, sealed her own condemnation. "How deep a wound," says Mr. Milman, "was inflicted on the national prosperity by this act of the 'most Christian Sovereign,' cannot easily be calculated, but it may be reckoned among the most effective causes of the decline of Spanish greatness."

This was Shaftesbury's understanding of how God applied Genesis 12:3 to European history: "I will bless those who bless you, and him who dishonors you I will curse, and in you all the families of the earth shall be blessed."

On this side of the Atlantic in the 19th century, the newly emerging premillennial literalists were also looking for Jews to play a role in the end-time drama of redemption. Yaakov Ariel observes that these evangelicals (and we would add English evangelicals and Pietists on the continent) were unusual in the history of Christianity: seldom had a large group assigned so much importance to Jews and their return to the land. In no other case had one religious community claimed for another community a special relationship with God. And in no other field had Christian missionaries found merit in the religion whose members they were trying to convert or found authority in their scriptures.

Article Continued On Next Page

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12/2/2022 9:05:59 PM

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